Free Fighter's Mind, A by Sam Sheridan Page B

the mat time, thousands and thousands of hours of just getting beat on by better guys. As Pat Miletich says, “You gotta take a lot of beatings.”
    Still, there are some practitioners who are so good, so dominant, that it seems they must be doing something different. One of the most recent examples is Marcelo Garcia.
    The image that springs to mind is the grainy footage of the Abu Dhabi Combat Club (ADCC) Submission Wrestling World Championship in ’03, the biggest submission grappling tournament in the world. The tourney, usually just called Abu Dhabi, was created by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nayan, son of a former UAE president. He was a combat enthusiast and friend of the Gracies. With a love of grappling and some money he started a championship in Abu Dhabi, and to this day it is the one contest where pure grapplers can make some money.
    Abu Dhabi happens every two years. Now, due to its size, popularity, and visa issues, it usually takes place in the United States or Brazil. In terms of submission wrestling, it’s the cream of the crop, extremely rarefied air.
    In ’03 Marcelo Garcia appeared out of nowhere to blitz his weight class (66-76 kg). He was awarded Most Technical Fighter and made it to the second round in the Absolute, where fighters from all weight classes can compete. Marcelo’s a small guy with a friendly face, an ordinary physique, and a serious look in his eye. At Abu Dhabi, he was like a killer spider monkey, swarming all over these guys, making the best submission wrestlers in the world look helpless. In 2005 and 2007, he not only won his division but placed second and third, respectively, in the Absolute division. He was competing with the best heavyweights, guys fifty or seventy pounds heavier than himself. Go YouTube Marcelo Garcia right now and come back.
    Mike Ciesnolevicz, a 205-pound fighter at Pat Miletich’s gym in Iowa and one of the better grapplers at the camp, remembers the first time he rolled with Marcelo. He’d seen the Abu Dhabi footage and tracked Marcelo down to a seminar. This was back in 2004, just as Marcelo was appearing on everyone’s radar. Mike recalls with a deep and offended sense of shock how quickly Marcelo forced him to tap out. Mike C is a stud on the ground; he’s a high-level grappler who rolls with the toughest guys and rarely gets tapped. Marcelo tapped him in fifteen seconds. Then he did it again, a minute later, with the same move . It’s the kind of thing that Mike does to me, a smaller guy with about a year of on-and-off grappling experience. Nobody, but nobody, does that to Mike. He laughs about it. “I didn’t know there was someone out there who was that good at jiu-jitsu. I told Charles McCarthy, Rory Singer, all these UFC guys about him and they were skeptical. But now they’ve all trained with him and they all agree that he’s amazing.” Mike laughed some more.
    “First thing they all said, ‘I’ve never been treated like that on the mat.’ He’s not a normal black belt. I can hold my own with most normal black belts. He’s on a different level.” It was Mike C who made me look harder at Marcelo.
    Marcelo isn’t using some secret ninjutsu technique—he’s just doing things so quickly, so well, and so far in advance of his opponents that he makes them look stupid. He just seems to have more options, as if everybody else has learned only a limited form of what he does.
    So I went down to Florida to pick Marcelo’s brain. How does Marcelo Garcia think about jiu-jitsu? He’d recently moved there and was training at American Top Team, under the watchful eye of Ricardo Liborio.
    American Top Team (ATT) is probably the biggest MMA gym in the United States at the moment, with the most top-level pros. It’s the brainchild of Ricardo Liborio, who was a member of the mythic Carlson Gracie Team and a founding partner of the groundbreaking Brazilian Top Team. Liborio is also a name in the world of jiu-jitsu; some people say that he has the